Translating ethics into action
Georgetown’s Ethics Lab is a team of philosophers and designers using new methods to help students and practitioners meet the ethical challenges of an increasingly complex world.
Profound changes in technology are re-shaping society at an unprecedented rate. Challenges to the environment are as complex as they are urgent. Advances in healthcare are radically transforming its practice around the globe.
Confronting these challenges requires deep understanding of the ethical issues at stake. It also requires an agile skill-set for navigating them, and moving beyond criticism to action.
Our approach combines a deep foundation in ethical expertise, strong knowledge of technical fields and real world contexts, and methods adapted from design.
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Educational Mission
A core mission of Ethics Lab is to innovate ethics education to help our students to responsibly confront — and help address — complex and evolving ethical challenges.
Course Innovation
We work as a team to rapidly pilot, iterate, and refine new courses at the forefront of emerging high stakes issues, from the recent explosion of development in AI to the environmental crisis of climate change. Our courses use collaborative, design-oriented activities and assignments to move students from careful analysis to a mindset for creative change.
Embedded Ethics Program
We collaborate with faculty in tech, health, and the environment to embed ethical discussion into their courses. Together, we co-design interactive exercises anchored to a course’s syllabus to integrate understanding and appreciation of the ethical issues inherent in the fields they will help to lead.
Program Partnerships
We partner with Georgetown’s next generation of academic programs in emerging issues. Ethics Lab served as incubator of a new undergraduate program in Tech, Ethics, and Society, and continues to deliver signature courses for the program that connect technical issues and methods to those in the humanities. Ethics Lab is currently working with Georgetown’s Earth Commons to integrate ethics throughout the arc of the student experience for a new proposed degree in Environment and Sustainability.
Real-World Collaborations
A core mission of Ethics Lab is to reach outside the academy, and collaborate with those actively working to address these moral challenges. We work with selected partners from the tech, health, and environment sectors, including policy teams and companies founded to advance the common good.
We work closely with our partners, helping them navigate the moral stakes their work confronts, and center ethics into their designs and mindset. Our external partners include foundations working to develop concrete guidelines on issues of urgent global reach, and companies working on solutions to pressing, fast-moving, and ethically complex issues.
